Enhancing Transferability and Consistency in Cross-Domain Recommendations via Supervised Disentanglement

TL;DR

This paper introduces DGCDR, a GNN-based framework that improves cross-domain recommendation by dynamically disentangling features and using anchor-based supervision to enhance transferability and consistency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel GNN-enhanced encoder-decoder model with hierarchical supervision for better disentanglement and transfer in cross-domain recommendations.

Findings

Achieves up to 11.59% performance improvement over baselines.

Demonstrates superior disentanglement quality and transferability.

Validates effectiveness through extensive experiments on real-world datasets.

Abstract

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to alleviate the data sparsity by transferring knowledge across domains. Disentangled representation learning provides an effective solution to model complex user preferences by separating intra-domain features (domain-shared and domain-specific features), thereby enhancing robustness and interpretability. However, disentanglement-based CDR methods employing generative modeling or GNNs with contrastive objectives face two key challenges: (i) pre-separation strategies decouple features before extracting collaborative signals, disrupting intra-domain interactions and introducing noise; (ii) unsupervised disentanglement objectives lack explicit task-specific guidance, resulting in limited consistency and suboptimal alignment. To address these challenges, we propose DGCDR, a GNN-enhanced encoder-decoder framework. To handle challenge (i), DGCDR first applies GNN to extract high-order collaborative signals, providing enriched representations as a robust foundation for disentanglement. The encoder then dynamically disentangles features into domain-shared and -specific spaces, preserving collaborative information during the separation process. To handle challenge (ii), the decoder introduces an anchor-based supervision that leverages hierarchical feature relationships to enhance intra-domain consistency and cross-domain alignment. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DGCDR achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of up to 11.59% across key metrics. Qualitative analyses further validate its superior disentanglement quality and transferability. Our source code and datasets are available on GitHub for further comparison.